The use and abuse of British Muslims

Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.

Muslims attend Friday prayers in the courtyard of a housing estate next to the small BBC community centre and mosque in east London (Reuters/Stefan Wermuth) / Reuters

The British state continues to facilitate “Islamist terrorism,” but is using new legislation to promote racism and crackdown on dissent.

Using the specter of “ISIS terrorism” as cover, David Cameron is
pushing through the latest chapter in the British state’s ongoing
crackdown on civil liberties. But he is doing nothing to stop the
terrorism he has helped to create.

The British state has been facilitating and promoting terrorism
in Syria and Libya for the past four years. Since the beginning
of the Syrian insurgency, the British government has been
calling for its victory, meeting its leaders (including those openly allied to al-Qaeda), providing it with
military equipment, training its forces, and has even chipped in
to a £30million project to improve its public relations
techniques.

Bombarded with lurid, misrepresented, and sometimes simply
fabricated, stories about Assad’s brutality – and equally
whitewashed accounts of the rebel forces –
from the British media, hundreds of British Muslims responded to
the propaganda campaign by going to join the valiant “freedom
fighters” Cameron had been applauding so loudly. The British
intelligence services openly facilitated their passage, as the
revelations at the recent trial of Moazzam
Begg made abundantly clear.

When the volunteers arrived, however, they discovered that the
real situation in Syria was nothing like the image they had been
fed by the BBC, ITN and Al Jazeera. The simple narrative of an
oppressed people rising up against a hated dictator was muddied
by the sectarian violence common amongst the insurgents, their
gratuitous targeting of civilians, and the widespread support for
the government still clearly evident amongst huge swathes of the
population, including the supposedly oppressed Sunnis who
continue to make up the majority of the Syrian army. Some of those
who went to fight became disillusioned –as was perhaps the case
with the two brothers jailed last week – whilst others were
influenced by - and even developed a taste for - the sectarian
brutality they found themselves a part of. Over time, the
disillusioned either returned home, or, if they were Syrian
themselves, even began to “critically support” the government, seeing it as the
“lesser of two evils,” leading what had effectively become an
existential war of national defense against a Western-backed
terror campaign. In the process, the
insurgency became increasingly stripped of its liberal veneer,
and ever more openly a war of extreme religious chauvinism,
targeting entire sections of the population on the basis of sect
and race as much as political affiliation.

Of course, there was always the danger of “blowback” for the
British state – the danger that those young Britons who had been
“radicalized” in Syria (establishment double-speak for
brainwashed, traumatized and initiated into a life of violence)
would return to practice their new skills back home.

But rather than admit that its campaign of destabilization
against Syria has been a murderous disaster and reversing it, the
British state has launched yet another round of “counter-terror”
measures, which implicitly point the finger of blame at the
British Muslim community itself – precisely the section of
British society who have suffered most from the government’s
abuse of their youth as cannon fodder for their proxy war against
Syria. Indeed, it is the parents of those youngsters lured into
fighting in Syria who have been most angered by the British
state’s effective endorsement and facilitation of the misguided activities of
their children.

No one should be fooled into thinking that either the new
“counter-terror” bill or the recent prosecution of two Britons
returning from Syria actually represents a change of heart. It is
worth noting that, far from discouraging terrorism, both the
legislation and the court case create an incentive for British
Muslims in Syria to stay there and keep fighting. When Moazzam
Begg – who had admitted to making frequent trips to Syria in
order to help the insurgency – was put on trial, MI5 eventually
came to his defense and admitted they had given him the “green light”’ for everything he was doing,
ensuring the collapse of the prosecution case. No intelligence
agencies sprang to the defense of the two brothers last week,
however, and both were given sentences of several years. Yet the
judge had admitted that not only was there no evidence of their
planning terrorism in the UK, but also that there was no evidence they had even been involved in the fighting
in Syria. Was this, perhaps, what they were really being punished
for – for refusing to co-operate with MI5 and fight in
Britain’s proxy war? Is this why no one in MI5 spoke up for them?
Either way, the message being sent to Britons in Syria is clear -
stay and fight, because if you dare to come back you will be
punished; a message clearly backed up by the new bill’s proposals
to give the government the power to ban its citizens from
returning home at all. Those British Muslims in Syria and Iraq
who might have might have come to their senses and realized that
they were conned by the Cameron/ Hague/ Al Jazeera/ BBC “freedom
fighter” narrative, are now effectively being told by the British
state that desertion is a crime and they must stay and finish the
job. The Begg case shows that the only way to guarantee their
immunity from prosecution is with MI5 protection, and the only
way to attain that, it seems, is by being able to demonstrate
some real service to the destabilization campaign. Try to return
without even have fired a shot, and the fate of the London
brothers awaits you.

It is in this light – of the British state’s use of Muslims to
act as proxy soldiers for their campaigns of destabilization
against independent third world states such as Libya and Syria –
that we should view the “anti-terror” legislation. The strategy
of recruiting British Muslims as foot soldiers for Britain’s wars
is obviously fraught with danger. Unlike sending in ground forces
as an occupying army, there is no direct chain of command from
the British state, there is the danger that they will turn
against their handlers, and so on. Therefore by granting new
powers of house arrest, seizing passports, banning return home
etc, this gives the intelligence services a very real additional
power in terms of controlling and manipulating the fighters
involved. Refusal to co-operate can get you put under house
arrest, or ensure that your passport is removed. But co-operation
can be rewarded with MI5 protection. And all of it can be
presented to the public as the precise opposite – as the
intelligence services diligently working to crack down on
terrorism.

Of course, none of this means that the threat of terrorism within
Britain is not real. But this week’s trial of a far-right British soldier for
possession of a nail bomb suggests it does not emanate solely
from the Muslim community. Indeed, the largest ever haul of
explosives in Britain – along with a rocket launcher - was
discovered by police in the house of a BNP
member in 2006, and according to Europol data, only 0.4 percent of terrorist attacks between 2006 and
2008 were carried out by Islamists. Likewise there has yet to be
a single prosecution of anyone returning from Syria planning
attacks on British soil. Yet the presentation of the threat in
the media always associates terrorism with Islam. This serves a
double purpose - not only does it serve to scapegoat a vulnerable
and under-represented community for Britain’s promotion of
terrorism abroad, but it also deludes the white, non-Islamic,
majority into thinking that anti-terror laws are not also aimed
at them. We have already seen how existing “counter-terror”
legislation has been used to crack down on protest and other
misdemeanors totally unrelated to terrorism – from the arrest of 82-year old Water Wolfgang
following his violent eviction from the Labour party conference,
to councils spying on people’s dustbin habits. The reality is that once the
police, the Home Secretary, and other state agencies are given
“anti-terror” powers, they will use them as part of their
everyday toolkit. And there is a good reason for them to beef up
this toolkit against dissent right now – the imminent prospect of
another financial crash.

David Cameron himself is but the latest establishment figure to
admit that another crash is very likely on
the way; others have gone further, with Martin Wolf of the
Financial Times arguing that it is inevitable. When it
occurs, it will massively deepen the existing economic crisis,
and lead to unprecedented job, benefit and wage cuts, dwarfing
even the already unprecedented cuts of the past few years. The
social unrest, dissent and revolt this will produce will be huge,
and the ongoing waves of “counter-terror” legislation will ensure
that the state has the legislative framework already in place to
launch massive crackdowns without the need for legal niceties of
evidence, courts, trials etc. The current bill’s proposal to
lower the burden of proof for imposing house arrest (now known as
Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures) from “reasonable
belief” to “balance of probabilities” is a particularly
contemptuous snub to the entire basis of the British legal
system. But it is not one without precedent, following on from
other measures over the past fourteen years which have extended
detention without charge, banned “unauthorized” protests outside
parliament, and allowed the government to strip dual nationals of citizenship, amongst
many others.

Once again, the specter of “Islamist terrorism” has provided the
popular acquiescence necessary to push these measures through.
The media’s complicity has been absolute. The proposal to allow
the mass government snooping of internet data – already standard
practice, albeit currently illegal – was
justified largely by a well-timed “revelation” that one of Lee
Rigby’s killers, Michael Adebalajo, used Facebook to communicate
his intentions to a colleague. This tidbit, revealed in a report
by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, was front
page, top of the hour, news across pretty much all British-based
channels and newspapers. What was almost universally ignored from
the same Committee report, however – or at least relegated to the
inside pages – was the revelation that MI5 had been in frequent
contact with Adebelajo for over ten years, and in particular
during the run up to Rigby’s murder, during which time they had
been attempting to recruit him to work for the organization.
Indeed, according to his friends and family, it was precisely
this MI5 pressure and harassment which largely motivated his
fatal attack on Rigby. In other words, whilst the media were
pushing the line that Facebook was responsible for the killing –
implying that it could have been prevented if only state agencies
were given greater powers of surveillance – they were sitting on
a story which suggested the exact opposite – that Rigby’s murder
was carried out by a man driven to it by the British state in its
desperate attempt to extend its collaboration with “Islamist
terrorism.”

By presenting the matter in the way they did, the media helps to
ensure that the majority white, non-Muslim, British public is
lulled into the idea that the tearing up of civil liberties is
something that will only affect Muslims – so therefore the rest
of us have nothing to worry about. The British state is promoting
and tapping into a latent Islamophobia in order to tear up the
civil liberties of the entire population – even whilst it
continues to rely on “Islamist terrorism” to fight its proxy wars
against independent third world states abroad. This is cynicism
at its purest.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.